Apple Opens Its Own 600-Person Live Music Venue in London

Apple is getting deeper into the live music industry with the opening of Apple Music Hall, a new purpose-built concert venue in London, England.

Located inside the historic Battersea Power Station, Apple Music Hall is a 600-capacity venue designed to host intimate performances while recording and broadcasting them worldwide. The company announced that the space includes a 38-foot-wide reconfigurable stage and a 48-speaker spatial sound system surrounding the audience. This allows artists to perform concerts mixed specifically for an immersive Spatial Audio experience.

Apple has essentially built a recording studio and broadcast facility around the stage, too. The space contains two dedicated recording and mixing studios that can capture performances as multitrack recordings and produce finished Spatial Audio mixes. The venue is also hardwired for at least 16 cameras connected to a dedicated broadcast control room.

Interestingly, that infrastructure supports iPhone video capture alongside traditional broadcast cameras, giving Apple another showcase for its increasingly professional-focused iPhone camera tools. The idea is that an artist could perform one concert and leave with a completed Spatial Audio recording, broadcast-ready audio mix and multicamera video production.

Apple will also livestream select Apple Music Hall performances globally, meaning the 600-person capacity won’t necessarily limit who can watch. The venue continues Apple’s longstanding investment in music, which stretches from iTunes and the iPod to Apple Music. More recently, the company has pushed Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos as a differentiating feature of Apple Music.

Apple is also moving its London-based Apple Music Radio operations into new studios at Battersea Power Station. Hosts will broadcast live from the facility, continuing the service’s interviews, premieres and music programming.

Apple Music Hall is open now, with information about upcoming performances and tickets being released through the venue’s website and social channels. For Apple, it’s an unusually physical expansion of a digital service, built to turn a single live show into considerably more than a concert.